Our washing machine leaks. A slow watery crawl from the base of the machine to a dozen outdated paint cans stashed under a table. Not large, but it grows with every wash.

Actually, this problem began one year ago. Exactly. I found the repairman’s bill. (Yes, there are still a few repairmen and, yes, he’s the same repairman I’ve used for years, not only for the washing machine but the refrigerator too). Aaron replaced the rubber rim. Or gasket. Or something or other that manages spin and whatever Aaron did, it worked. Until now. Although Aaron warned me. He said our Maytag was a war horse and that whenever it gave up the ghost we’d be in trouble, like everyone else, we’d be forced to buy a machine that was digital. And that none of them lasts. Not like the old ones.

We’ve had the Maytag for 25 years.

I’m writing about this because one, I want to be writing, and two, I want to be writing about something entirely other than the washing machine but the washing machine problem needs to be solved.

We—my husband and I—went shopping for a new machine late Saturday. We had wanted to go Christmas shopping but no. Yes, first-world problem, you can be sure. Nevertheless. We considered two models, very different in style and capacity. The next morning we went online—most people would go online before driving to the store I think but we are who we are—and by the end of the day we’d reached a decision.

We don’t need a capacity of 3.3 cubic feet and certainly not 5.2.

2.2 is what we’ve had for twenty-five years, 2.2 is just fine. And we don’t need to wash 17 bath towels all at one time.

We don’t care about app capability. We don’t want to do our laundry by phone.

Wanting to write about something entirely other than washing machines . . . wanting to think about something entirely other than washing machines . . . I asked my husband to call the store Monday morning and cinch the deal. This year I had the hot water heater replaced and the roof repaired, along with the boiler and main water line connection and at least one other thing that I can’t remember. He understands. Because I’ve been wanting to write about this dark time, this end of the year, this season of lights, when I go in and out of illumination and shadow, joy and doubt, because one year is ending, and where do I find myself, and a new one is opening.

Aneta Grzeszykowska subverts the normative mother-daughter behavior in her series Mama, photographsI find to be as irresistible as they are deeply disturbing. The artist appears as herself in each image. Herself, that is, as an adult doll, a simulacrum of her naked upper torso. Her daughter—aged seven? eight?— is always near, glimpsed as a full figure or as the side of a face, a hand, a leg, a foot. Daughter rests with Mother on a bed; Daughter rolls Mother in a little cart down to the river; Daughter floats face up in the river next to Mother; helps Mother take a drag on a cigarette; gives Mother a bath; puts makeup on Mother; poses Mother on a chaise longue, an abandoned toy doll face down in the foreground. Mother appears frozen, as indeed she is; frozen due to trauma or death? Is Daughter caretaker or custodian? Companion or guardian? Are we observers to Daughter caring for Mother? Or voyeurs to Daughter’s playtime? Is Mama the Persephone myth turned on its head? Or a visual folk tale, strange as folk tales are?

In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver plays a bus driver-poet named Paterson in—wait—Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson is a poet of the purest variety, one who writes and studies poetry for the simple joys themselves. He cares not a whit to copy his poems from what he calls his secret notebook, to send them out to magazines, for him it's enough to read them at night to Laura, his wife and muse (nod to Petrarch). He composes poems as he walks to and from the bus depot every morning and evening and we have the pleasure of hearing his lines and reading them onscreen as he thinks them. (The poet behind these poems is Ron Padgett.) Paterson also works on his poems as he sits on a bench overlooking the Paterson Great Falls eating his lunch (Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems makes a cameo appearance), a lunch lovingly prepared by Laura, played by the lovely Golshifteh Farahani. Yes, there's a lot of twinning at play, a charming device derived I suspect from the twinned name of William Carlos Williams (or as Laura refers to him, Carlos Williams Carlos) who made Paterson the locus of his imagination and his famous epic poem. The film is divided into the days of one week, Monday through Sunday, in which nothing much happens. That is, almost nothing. Paterson drives his bus. He eavesdrops on passengers’ conversations, many of which refer to other notable Paterson natives (Lou Costello, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Allen Ginsburg, Gaetano Bresci). He writes his poems, walks the couple’s English bulldog Marvin, gets a beer at the neighborhood bar where (is it Wednesday or Thursday?) he intervenes in an unexpected act of violence which turns out unexpectedly to be not violent. He somehow manages to meet an astounding number of identical twins, one of whom, a ten-year-old girl, is also a poet and a very good one. Laura is an artist as well, but unlike Paterson she’d like to be famous. As in: country music star. She revels in black-and-white designs, from curtains to cupcakes and a Harlequinesque guitar. She urges him to get those poems out of his secret notebook and onto a copy machine and into the hands of a publisher. He promises he will. On their one big night out they see a movie, the 1932 black-and-white The Island of Lost Souls, which foreshadows (and twins?) the one big thing that does happen to Paterson and that throws him off balance. But not for long. This is a fantasy, after all. And I’m not saying.

Paterson is a meditation on place. And an ode to poetry and the quiet acts of observation that feed its writing. Most of all it’s a celebration of the quotidian nature of making art. The highs, the lows. Day in, day out. I loved it.

I went to New York a few days ago as a form of escape. I needed fantasy and beautiful music (The King and I); a good story and a different kind of beautiful music (Fun Home); and I was intrigued by news of the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the Guggenheim. I’d seen a few of her sculptures last summer at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and knew I wanted to see more. I sensed her work might offer me a temporary way around the high pitch of violence continuously audible here and abroad—racist, misogynist, drug-related, random, terrorist, tyranny-driven, conflict-driven—violence that illustrates just how eminently capable we are as a species to objectify one another, to devalue another’s life. The need to address this dark human capacity is at the core of Doris Salcedo’s thirty years of making art.

Prompted originally by violence in her native Colombia—by the massacres and disappearances of thousands whose bodies went to mass graves unaccounted for—and by the effects those violent events have wrought, she has since assumed as her subject matter, or as her point of contemplation, aspects of violence suffered by other groups and populations as well: in Istanbul; Guantánamo; refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East; gang shootings in Los Angeles; to name several. Her materials are shoes and clothing, salvaged furniture, earth, concrete, animal skin and fiber, human hair, sewing needles, and silk thread. For one of her pieces, rose petals were treated to retain their color and flexibility and were then sewn together to create an expansive mantle. Her images are often synecdochic. The shoes encased in a wall, behind parchment, for example, as in the above photo, speak to the fact that the remains of bodies in mass graves can often be identified by the shoes lying nearby. In the photo below, the human hair visible on the surface of the wooden table has been actually stitched into the fiber of the wood, alluding to the physicality of a person no longer present.

from Unland, the orphan‘s tunic 1997

Other images are metaphorical, as with dressers and armoires sealed shut with concrete, fragments of clothing trapped within, suggesting the daily particulars of lives cut short. Her sculptures are meticulously hand-crafted, typically arranged in groups so as to form a sort of ritual space. Salcedo’s installations do not merely address the void that surrounds and swallows the identities of victims of violence—her installations defy the void, they turn the void inside out, and create places of mourning, where families and friends of the lost might come to remember. And where we, as museum-goers and onlookers, might contemplate the meaning of violence and the sacred nature of life.

This essay is in two parts; there are no spoilers in this first section.

A friend asked in a recent email: “Have you finished Book 4? Do you think Ferrante pulled it off?” The answer is “Yes and, well, mostly." Book 4 picks up where Book 3 left off with its rather flip ending. Elena continues her affair with Nino. Throughout that drama and the tumult surrounding her separation from Pietro, and despite several publishing successes, Elena’s voice can be wearying. But when she moves with her daughters to Naples, and Lila is squarely back in the story, the book takes off. The two women attempt to re-establish intimacy. In fact, Lila, now the owner of a fledgling computer firm, attempts to draw Elena into her plan to reform the rione—the neighborhood—forcing Elena to grapple with the conflicting demands of her roles as mother and writer in the public spotlight. Several crises interfere, one literally earth-shattering: The 1980 Naples earthquake, described in haunting, palpable detail. The “lost child” of the title is the most significant crisis by far, creating a gap between the two women that’s extremely difficult to bridge. Within the great web of troubles and comings and goings that Elena recounts, we get to see again all the characters we’ve come to know and love—or fear; by the book’s close all their final tales have been told, and every thread stitched into place, much of it against the backdrops of corruption both in Naples and on the national stage during the 80s and 90s. Rising far above all those tales is the spellbinding story of Lila “the brilliant friend” (or is that Elena?) who grows more mysterious and unpredictable in late middle age, as at the same time Elena’s loneliness and self-doubt expand. The questions readers have been asking ever since Lila disappeared at the start of Book 1—Is she still she alive? Will she reappear?—are finally answered, in a way that, not surprisingly, leads to more questions. It was often difficult to put the book down; at other times I yearned for fewer plot turns and a more cohesive structure. But that’s a minor complaint. Book 4 ends a powerful tale about the odds against anyone who tries to rise above a world of poverty and violence to lead a life of meaning. In Book 4 that “anyone” is not only Elena, but also Lila, Alfonso, Enzo, Antonio, and Pasquale. Their stories move me deeply. I can’t get them out of mind, nor do I want to.

There are spoilers in the discussion below. If you return to this blog after you’ve read Book 4—the English translation is due out in September—please send me your comments. I’d love to hear what you think.

At the start of Book 4 Elena again reminds us of the imperative for her writing about her and Lila’s lives—the fact that Lila has disappeared and taken away or destroyed everything she ever owned, down to the last scrap of paper. “Now that I’m at the saddest part of our story, I want to find, on the page, an equilibrium between myself and her that I’ve not been able to find in life even between myself and me.” Elena’s need to see herself through Lila is the engine of all four books; for me, Lila is by far the stronger, more interesting character, and I often found myself wishing not for an equilibrium, but for an imbalance. Meaning: Less of Elena, more of Lila.

Yes, Elena can be tiresome. She blindly suffers Nino’s narcissism and philandering. She too often voices insecurities about her writing, too often adds up her accomplishments as if to assure herself they’re real. As with the earlier volumes, the reader never learns the specific content of Elena’s books and articles. For example, she says her essays on feminist politics and gender equality are often discussed at readings and conferences, yet we never learn how she really thinks. Feminist? Yes. Proletarian? Yes. Beyond that? Unknown. She admits that she speaks about politics in only generic terms: Observing how Nino writes and speaks, she acknowledges that revolutionary parlance is naïve, and that a more complex approach to understanding problems is necessary, but it’s one she doesn’t own. She grows cautious and relies on what she knows best: “It came naturally to me to transform the small events of my private life into public reflections . . . I spoke each evening of the world I came from, of its misery and decay, the rage of men, and women too . . . of the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subservience to men . . . I spoke about how I always tried, in order to assert myself, to adopt a masculine intelligence.“ When she’s criticized in public for her statements surrounding the Moro case, she loses her self-confidence. There are various mentions of the political climate, as when we witness Franco’s depression and suicide and read his reasons as to why Italy is in decline. But we never get much beyond that. Elena is proud of the intellectual life she shares with Nino in private, of the “cultivated conversations” of the dinner parties they host, but again, Elena simply alludes to the topics of those conversations. Those evenings, like her descriptions of her talks and articles, lack details and bear little weight. Or at least less weight than would seem appropriate for a writer whose public profile is discussed so very much within these pages.

Yet so different are Elena’s accounts of the grim reality of the rione! (Another mirror image is at play here: Elena Greco’s third publishing triumph—her novel about the rione—mirrors the Ferrante novel in our hands.) These scenes are the great riches of this tetralogy. Positively cinematographic, lush with intense highlights and shadows as if inspired by a Caravaggio painting, they contrast poverty and violence against intense affections and loyalties: Elena’s mother’s rage over her separation from Pietro; her mother’s illness and death; Elena’s observation of the change in her younger sister, now married to the mobster Marcello; the earthquake; Nino’s multiple betrayals; the pregnancies of Elena and Lila; the reappearance of alleged terrorists Pasquale and Nadia; Elena and Antonio’s reconciliation; Carmen’s protection of Pasquale; Rino and Gennaro’s heroin addictions; and so on. Elena Greco is insider and outsider wrapped into one. Once a sister and friend who’s left them for the big outside world, it’s precisely due to her reputation as a successful writer in that big outside world, and despite the fact that few in the rione have read much beyond her first “dirty” book, that her old friends accord her their deepest respect and reveal to her their fears, their pasts, their secrets. All of which she then shares with us. Beati noi. Lucky us.

Now and then, however, Ferrante the Author/Elena Greco the Narrator depart from their realist style to create situations and events that are truly outsize, or mysterious, or perhaps in need of a bit more basis? Consider the story of Alfonso: “I told about how I recently saw an old childhood friend try in all ways to subvert himself, extracting from himself the feminine.” Unlike the other men in the rione, Alfonso went to high school with Elena and was a talented student. Throughout the first three books, Elena considers him highly cultured and intelligent, and extremely handsome. In Book 3 he reveals to Elena that he’s gay. He’s unhappily married to Marisa and works in the shoe store for mobster Michele Solara who in turn is Marisa’s lover and the father of her two sons. In Book 4 Alfonso undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Elena is struck by how closely Alfonso has begun to resemble Lila. He wears his long dark hair in a ponytail, and his facial features have grown as fine and sharp as Lila’s, soon his gestures become like hers. There’s the strange occurrence in a maternity dress shop to which he’s taken the pregnant Elena and Lila. Lila asks him to try on a dress “so that she can see what it looks like on her”. He tries on the dress and Lila buys it for him, and then Elena understands this sort of thing has been going on for some time. Alfonso also has an undefined relationship with Michele Solara, who up until then has been head over heels in love with Lila despite the fact that she despises him . . . People take note of the fact that Michele is changing, he seems different . . . Michele seems to be attracted to Alfonso . . . Alfonso reveals to Elena that Lila has been encouraging him to tempt and confuse Michele in this game of assuming her image. Bizarre. We later see, sorrowfully, that this game results in terrible consequences. We can only guess that Michele was responsible, either directly or indirectly, for Alfonso’s death. I think it’s clear that Alfonso attempts to assume Lila’s feminine traits as a way out of their culture’s male violence. The fact that he does not have a place in the rione where he might truly be himself is deeply affecting—but is the game he plays with Lila not somewhat forced?

Lila is, of course, the first and greatest of Elena’s outsize characters, with both feet in the gritty world of the rione. But at times Lila departs from the real and the gritty, her perceptions and behaviors rising above and beyond the ordinary. She suffers moments of “disappearing borders”, as when in Book 1, her brother Rino’s face deconstructs among the fireworks and gunshots of New Year’s Eve. A copper pot bursts into pieces in her kitchen, the cause never understood. These events and others are summarized in Lila’s impassioned self-explanation after the earthquake: She has many fears, and no idea how to control their physical manifestations, and she runs from one man to the next to hide from them. Then there’s the iconic photo of her as a bride on the wall of the shoe shore that bursts into flames. And the fact that, though unschooled beyond fifth grade, she teaches herself Latin and Greek, and computer programming, and reads Ulysses, and has for years been writing a memoir. Do we want to believe in this outsize character? Yes, she’s the brilliant friend who was not allowed to go on in school, and married too young, and was abused. We are her cheerleaders. Does she have an undiagnosed psychological disorder? Quite likely. Should we believe that she has extraordinary powers? Hmmmm.

Another example of Ferrante’s hand perhaps forcing a situation is the mistaken identities of Elena’s and Lila’s daughters. The photographer who comes to shoot portraits of Elena, on the eve of her second novel’s debut, photographs her with Tina, Lila’s daughter, instead of with Imma. The caption accompanying the photo describes the pair as the author and her daughter. This mix-up is foreshadowed during Elena’s and Lila’s pregnancies, when Elena says to Lila: “I already have two girls. If in fact you do have a boy will you give him to me?” and Lila responds: “Sure, no problem, we’ll do an exchange.”

Later, Lila suspects that the erroneous caption is the reason her daughter Tina was kidnapped, that because Elena is a notable public figure the kidnappers wanted her daughter for ransom, not Lila’s. That theory doesn’t quite hold, since news articles would have made clear that Lila was not without financial resources and could have paid a ransom, but it makes room for yet another squabble between the two women: Elena is tempted to tell Lila that her fixed attention on Nino that afternoon is what caused her daughter to wander off. Does the book really need this last bit of rancor? Isn’t the event strong enough without it?

Attached to the disappearance of Tina is the delivery of the two old and broken childhood dolls. Elena’s discovery as she opened that unsigned package sent chills down my spine. The two dolls tied the two little girls of Book 1 together with the two mothers of Book 4, and with the image of the bereft and wandering Lila, now on a quest to somehow reconnect with her daughter. At the same time that the dolls are symbolic of the daughters, they’re totem objects, as they can be read as the embodiments of the two disparate selves of Elena and Lila. They’re also the artifacts of a friendship that’s ended, that can live only in their respective memories. Or perhaps in one memory only, that being Elena’s. The doll metaphor is so strong on its own I would have preferred less foreshadowing. Less plotting.

Standing back and looking at all four books: We could read them as one long tale of a divided self, with the two halves struggling to reunite into a mythic or psychological whole—Elena as the one who left, Lila as the one who stayed. I’d like to read it that way, but to do so I must embrace the Myth of Lila, the Outsize Lila, and not feel uncomfortable when tossed between realistic detail and hyperbole, or when manipulated by a too obvious hand.

At the same time, I must say, the high note of ambivalence that was struck at the end of Book 4 swept me right back under Ferrante’s spell. By then, Elena’s a grandmother, and her daughters are building lives outside of Italy. She has a dog. She has a lover she sees from time to time. She’s lonely. The best she has to hold onto is the book she’s written, the one we’re reading. But she fails to find peace in that. Again, she’s haunted by insecurity—she fears that the disappeared and seemingly broken Lila is secretly writing a book, somewhere, and that Lila’s book will be better than anything she herself has yet written . . . she would happily be Lila’s editor . . . and her book’s promoter. . . Is this a nod to Lila’s never-ending capacity for self-invention? Or simply a final acknowledgement of her ties to Lila and their common language, ties now and forever broken? When Elena says: “My entire life can be summed up as a petty struggle to change my social class”—should we take her at face value? Could it really be that Elena, in her loneliness, her aloneness, her otherness, regrets having ever left the ‘hood? Doubtful. Rather, we can read her aloneness as the result of her quest to self-invent, to defy her destiny in the face of overwhelming odds.

Set from 1968 through the late 70s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stayopens with a flash-forward to 2005. Elena Greco’s gone back to the rione, her old Naples neighborhood, to visit Lila Cerullo, her lifelong friend, alter ego, and frequent nemesis. Out for a walk the two women are drawn to a crowd gathered by the church, where they discover Gigliola, a childhood friend, lying dead in a flowerbed. This is one of the many “horrible things” that have happened in the untold amount of time since Elena last saw Lila. But we won’t read about those things just yet—not in this book. At the end of the visit Lila tells Elena that if she, Elena, plans to write about her or Gigliola or anyone else in the rione, she should just forget it, because they don’t deserve it, she and Gigliola don’t deserve anything, they should all just disappear. Furthermore, if Elena dares write about Lila, Lila will find Elena’s computer and erase all her files.

So once again Ferrante pulls us into her narrative with a shocking incident and the recitation of a pact renegotiated already several times: We started out as novelists but I (Lila) no longer write so you (Elena) must continue to do so for both of us. But don’t you dare write about me. In the first two books of this series the doppelganger-writer trope was a powerful device, especially in Book 2 where it brought dimension to the fractious, often tedious adolescent friendship of Elena and Lila. I’d been expecting that in Book 3, where as adult women they must deal with marriage, children, and work, in a time of intense political turmoil, there’d be some serious grappling. There is—but only when Lila’s in the story. Unfortunately, whenever Lila’s missing, so is the book’s heat.

Book 3 easily falls into three parts. In the first and most engaging, the action surrounds Lila in her job at a sausage factory in the Naples periphery, where working conditions are grisly and sexual harassment rampant. Not to mention that the factory owner—an old friend from summer days in Ischia—is in alliance with a far-right faction and indebted to loan-shark Michele Solara. Lila’s drawn unwillingly into a student-worker alliance, and she authors an eloquent manifesto-cum-list of grievances which becomes the basis of an article Elena then writes for L’Unita, the Communist Party newspaper. At the same time, Lila suffers a nervous breakdown of sorts, and Elena helps pull her through it.

In the second part the focus shifts to Florence, where Elena marries Pietro, a self-centered classics professor, and they start a family. Italian factories, streets and universities are teeming with dissent and repression. Against a background of bombings, kidnappings, and battles between student-worker alliances and right-wing factions, Elena and Pietro lead an isolated life, he consumed with his teaching and writing, she with raising two small girls. Elena now has precious little time to write, and the focus of this book shifts to that dilemma: What will become of her if she’s unable to write because of all her domestic demands? After she’s worked so hard to pull herself out of the rione, and has earned her degree, and published her first novel? Now that she’s married to a self-centered pedant who shows no respect for her mind or her work? Living in a city where she has no friends?

The third part begins when Nino Sarratore, the secret love of Elena’s life, appears in Florence as a visiting professor from Naples. Lila reappears a few times in this section, in her new guise as programmer for a database firm owned by the nefarious Michele Solara, but these appearances are fleeting.

The narrative in this volume, as in the second, involves more telling than showing—first this happened, then that, then this—oftenmaking for a tiresome read. Incidents are plentiful but few are memorable. Whenever the narrative develops into a full scene, however, especially those scenes set in and about Naples, all that changes and the writing becomes positively cinematic. As when Lila goes missing one evening and returns, traumatized, and tells Elena her story of abuse and violence in the sausage factory, including her confrontation with Bruno Soccavo, the factory owner, and Michele Solara. Or when Elena hosts her erstwhile friend Pasquale, who arrives at her Florence apartment unannounced and disheveled, growling about her bourgeois lifestyle. Or when Elena brings Pietro home for the first time to visit her family: How he’s a fountain of facts, knowing more about Naples than Elena, but incapable of reading the people around him, so that when the Neapolitans on the street stare at his big head of hair he’s oblivious; so that when he takes her family out to dinner and is ridiculed by a few students at a table across the way, he’s again oblivious, and when Elena’s brothers go over and start delivering punches, he has no idea why—maybe everyone acts this way in restaurants in Naples? They walk over to the other tables and start fights?

The timeframe of this book is the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead, and I’d hoped that the politics of the period would be more integrated with Elena’s blossoming. It doesn’t happen quite that way. Elena writes news articles about strikes, police surveillance, and disruptions at universities not because she’s politically engaged but because they’re something to write about, they’ll prove to her friends and in-laws that she’s knowledgeable and politically correct: “The rest was a flurry of air, an immaterial wave of images and sounds that, whether disastrous or beneficial, gave me material for my work, it threatened or it passed over, so that I could put it into magic words inside a story, an article, a speech, making sure that nothing was out of line and that every concept would be pleasing to the Airotas, to the publishing house, to Nino who for sure was reading it somewhere . . . and to Lila, who would have to finally say: Look, we were unfair to Elena, she’s on our side, look at these things she’s writing.” Elena’s engagement, such as it is, and her references to assassinations and bombings function primarily as background to the central story of her learning to believe and trust in herself. Is her situation as an educated and talented woman, now isolated as a wife and mother, and condescended to by her husband, not worthy of sympathy? Indeed, it is. Is it tiresome to read about her frustrations, her insecurities, and her lack of clarity? Indeed, it is.

Does Elena ever make a move on her own? At times. She wants to start birth control before her marriage, so as to not put her writing career at risk, but her husband and her doctor are against it, and so she doesn’t start on the pill until after her second child. She becomes a member of a women’s consciousness group. She writes a second book, a long essay about female characters as created by male writers (DeFoe, Flaubert, Tolstoy) and how their work functions as a retelling of the Adam and Eve story. I’m still not clear on what exactly the reader is supposed to take away from this. A reference—wink, wink—to the controversy surrounding the identity of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante?* I found this account somewhat garbled and the ideas not at all new, even considering that Elena would have been writing in the heady feminism of the 70s: Simone de Beauvoir did a similar analysis of five male authors in 1949, in a chapter of The Second Sex. In fact, whenever Elena refers to this other writing—the essay on the Holy Spirit in Book 2, or her first novel, or her newspaper articles—she simply refers to them, she doesn’t fully discuss them, and therefore the reader fails to learn exactly how Elena thinks or who, at heart, she really is. Which is a weird situation for a series that’s partly about a writer struggling to affirm her identity as a writer. Unless, that is, we’re supposed to regard the products of Elena’s writing as ghost texts, say, illusive meta-texts, texts that in themselves amount to little or nothing when set beside whatever it is that Lila’s doing. Or writing. After all, Elena started to write the tetralogy I am now reading when Lila disappeared, precisely because Lila disappeared. Even though we’ve read that Elena threw Lila’s journals into the Arno, and that Lila burnt the novel she wrote as a young girl, Lila’s life remains the ur-text of this tetralogy. Even though Lila protests in Book 3 that she hasn’t read a book in years, we’d be foolish to think she isn’t still writing something, somewhere. Writing something that she destroyed before she disappeared without a trace, back in Book 1, as her son says, disappeared without leaving so much as a scrap. If that’s the strategy, that Elena’s texts aren’t meant to have a weight equal to that of Lila’s texts, then something else about Elena needs weight if her character is to hold our interest.

Finally, at the end of the book, Elena takes a big step on her own behalf, but the manner of her doing so is bizarre. Up until then she’s embodied all the virtues of a devoted mother. She speaks about her daughters with great love if not adoration. She showers them with attention, teaches them to read before they enter school, buys them the prettiest clothes. That people compliment her on her daughters’ intelligence and model behavior is a great source of pride. But then she makes a life-altering decision and executes it in a way that’s abrupt and altogether unnecessary. And that will no doubt affect her daughters negatively. Why? Is this Ferrante’s way of turning the selfless motherhood trope on its head? The soap-opera pacing that plagues this book is here capped by a ridiculous chick-lit ending.

So there it is. I was disappointed in this book. I will certainly finish the series—the Italian edition of Book 4 sits here on my desk (the English translation will come out in November)—but I won’t open it just yet. I need another writer’s voice in my head for awhile. And when I do open Book 4, I’ll be looking for Lila.

I took a break from Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and will soon to return to those. Meanwhile, three titles I highly recommend:

Nora Webster, Colm Toíbín (2014)

I came to the end of Nora Webster early one evening in January and laid the book on my reading sofa, and the next morning I picked it up and started all over again. I’ve read several reviews that describe Nora Webster as a character study; it’s that and more—a portrait of grief. Indeed, upon the death of her husband, Nora is locked in an emotional stasis so profound that her grief becomes a character in its own right.

With Maurice gone, and their two grown daughters away at school, Nora must finish raising their two young sons on her own. The question of money dominates: there’s not enough. Nora sells the family’s beloved summer cottage, and she returns to the dreary office in which she worked years ago, before she met Maurice. Everyone in town knows everyone else as well as their business. (Echoes of the busybodies in Toíbín’s Brooklyn. Also, Eilis,themain character in Brooklyn, is the sister of the man who buys Nora’s summer cottage). And everyone wants to help Nora, but help is offered in a patronizing manner, and Nora’s intrinsically critical self is further embattled. Simultaneous with her own suffering is that of her young sons, Conor and Donal, now not only fatherless but uncertain of their mother’s well-being. Furthermore, Donal has developed a strong stammer, about which everyone in the family and at school seems to be more concerned than Nora herself. Nora is so seemingly deaf and blind with grief that she cannot fully address much of what happens around her, and we, as readers, recognize the concern and frustration of those who observe her. At the same time, we are one with her disorientation and sadness, having observed the other characters and events wholly from her point of view. Nora recovers slowly and gently and, in large part, reinvents herself. Through a new friend she rediscovers her love of music, and joins a listening group, and begins to take singing lessons. Toíbín’s descriptions of the music she listens to and the songs she learns to sing constitute some of the most beautiful passages of this novel. Perhaps the greatest gift, however, of this quietly powerful book is that just as we, the readers, travel with Nora through a dense fog, we feel ourselves released, at the end, with her.

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Glück(2014)

In these highly meditative poems, memory meets refraction as a small group of travelers—seekers on a pilgrimage? souls of the departed caught between worlds?—tell their tales. I’ve been able to so far identify four distinct voices: a male artist; a female writer; a raconteur-philosopher and a secretary-chronicler, the gender of the last two unclear. The poems, or tales, unfold on mountain paths and rivers and seas, in Cornwall and London and Montana and in an unnamed “city famous for its wooden toys”. They speak of childhood and “that time of life/people prefer to allude to in others/but not in themselves”, and are spoken from beds and gardens and the office of an analyst, from cemeteries and riverboats and the artist’s studio. There are friends who are trusted but envied; strangers who tell stories of their own; parents; an aunt; a brother, a sister; there are missed trains, rides on steeds, and remnants of songs. The poems in the voices of the raconteur-philosopher and secretary-chronicler create a sort of theater and stage, providing an entrance and exit and the occasional scenery change: intermezzi from the meditations of the artist and the writer, the import of each meditation being not so much what happened, but why that which happened is remembered.

Citizen,an American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014)

How racism enters the body, and colonizes memory, and distorts the mind; how the body responds, often with dire consequences, or obeys the mind that chooses to not respond: this contra-dynamic is the core of Rankine’s brilliant, razor-sharp Citizen. Divided into seven sections that alternate between essays and poems, and are interspersed with photos, paintings, drawings and collages, Citizen ranges in content and style from anecdotes of private encounters to analyses of sports and media events to scripts for videos on Hurricane Katrina and Trayvon Martin, among other issues. Throughout, the narrator returns to this central question: How does one silence the memory of injustices and insults? “The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.” Some insults are obvious, others subtle. Some are spoken, others intended. They occur in public and in private, between strangers and between colleagues and friends; in school, in airplanes, in a drugstore checkout line, at a campus café lunch, even with a therapist; the effect is cumulative, an overwhelming “buildup of erasure”. So besieged is the “I” of the narrator that she/he must speak in second person, addressing the “you” that is herself/himself. Which, in the nature of the second person voice, addresses the “you” of the reader as well. “Don’t say I if it means so little,/holds the little forming no one.”And so the narrator wants to know: Should “you” act on what is heard? Should “you” not accept “erasure”? “To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then.”

Yes, Elena Ferrante’s Naples trilogy is a saga of the long and fiery friendship between two women—Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo—it’s what all the blurbs and headlines say. But behind that narrative is another story, a story of how two intellectually gifted women must struggle to grow into full, independent beings against odds stacked vertiginously high against them. Because no matter how smart, how crafty, how beautiful Elena and Lila might be—and they are all those—the awful truth in these books is Number One, the world was not created for women, and Number Two, it was certainly not created for women like Elena and Lila, born and raised in a poor and insular Neapolitan neighborhood. No matter how hard they try, and try they do, each in her own way, there are more reasons than not for them to stay trapped in poverty, mediocrity, vulgarity, and abuse.

As little six-year-olds, in My Brilliant Friend,Volume 1, they’re already well aware of the scarcities in their lives. They dream of writing a book together that will someday make them rich. As older girls, when one of them is permitted to attend middle school (Elena) and the other not, they’re forced to confront head-on other kinds of poverty: poverty of mind, poverty of spirit. Indeed, their parents know and care so little about the world beyond the stradone, the slum avenue on which they live—partly because they’re benighted, partly because they’re always working—that they never even take their children to downtown Naples or to the beach. Imagine: To live in Naples and not know it faces the sea! (The one time that Elena’s father takes her downtown it’s to figure out how she should take public transportation to middle school.) Abuse of women in their world is taken for granted, it’s an essential ingredient in male and female relationships and both girls have watched their fathers slap their mothers around. Elena wisely appreciates that to witness those slaps and beatings constitutes a sort of training, a sort of forerunner to her own future entanglements and she proceeds cautiously. Caution is no part of Lila’s personality, however, and when on her wedding day she learns that the men in her life—her new husband, her brother and father—have sold her shoe designs without her consent, she protests vigorously, the result being that her husband beats and rapes her on the first night of their honeymoon. So begins Story of a New Name, Volume 2.

The pace of the second volume is faster than that of the first, and there are many more incidents, dramatic highs and lows, and shifts between scenes and the wide range of characters. Whereas I likened the characterizations and events of the first volume to verismo opera in my first blog post on the trilogy, I must confess I found the second volume to be more like a soap opera, albeit an exceptionally good one. I found it difficult to keep track of all the twists and turns of events and of secondary characters. And since for the most part we’re offered descriptions of the many secondary characters only once, when we first meet them, I found it difficult to visualize them as they appeared in what was at times an almost dizzying array of incident. Characters and events seemed more fantastic in the first volume, perhaps because in that book the narrator looks back to childhood, where so much of life seems large and mysterious. In the second volume, in which the points of view are those of teenagers and young adults, the events are more quotidian.

The second volume opens, as did the first, with a highly provocative scene. On one of Elena’s visits home from Pisa, where she’s on scholarship at a prestigious university, Lila entrusts her with a metal box for safekeeping. Inside the metal box are eight notebooks that Lila wants no one to ever read—not her husband, not Elena. Elena guarantees their safety and privacy and then as soon as she gets back on the train to Pisa she opens the box and reads every one, awed and humbled by the power of Lila’s writing, her eloquence, her attention to detail and the seeming perfection of every sentence, written in the same longhand style they both learned as young girls. The notebooks begin with Lila’s life at the end of elementary school and they close with her growing despair as Stefano’s wife. They encompass her life on the stradone—descriptions of the people, buildings and streets, shops and gardens; her thoughts on the books she’s read and movies she’s seen; her interactions with Elena and everyone else; all her ups and downs. Elena says: “I studied them, and finished by committing to memory the paragraphs I liked, those that excited me, that hypnotized me, that humiliated me.” And so at the start of the second book we hear echoes of the first: What began as the desire to write a novel together at age six becomes realized as Elena draws upon Lila’s notebooks to write her own books—yes—the very same novels we are in the process of reading. (In yet another echo, the fictional Elena writes the novels of her eponymous, anonymous author. Or is it the other way around? Hmmm.) With Elena’s discovery of Lila’s writing, the fires of competition between them are once more stoked. For as Elena correctly intuits, whatever Elena succeeds in doing, Lila invariably shows her up, whether it’s Lila’s secret writing and learning of languages, or learning to swim stronger, farther, faster in just a few weeks, or stealing Nino, the love of Elena’s life. So, back in Pisa, having digested her friend’s work, Elena grows angry: “I couldn’t deal anymore with having Lila on my back, and inside me, especially now that I had gained such respect, now that I had finally gotten out of Naples.” She carries the notebooks to a bridge over the Arno and throws them in.

As small girls Elena and Lila know they’re the smartest students in their class if not in the entire school, and their bond is based on recognition of each other’s sharp native intelligence. As adolescents, even though they no longer go to school together, their bond grows in proportion to their shared hunger, a hunger to know and to have more than the meager amount assigned them by destiny, a hunger to reach to the top of the tree, to grasp the fruit they can barely see from where they stand on the ground below. Elena learns through the women who are her teachers, La Oliviera and La Galiana, that the world is immense, and that to have knowledge is to take control of one’s life. But there is so much to know! How does one put it all together? These are the questions Elena ponders repeatedly, middle school through university. Diligent scholar that she is, no sooner does she arrives at one plateau of knowledge and accomplishment than that she sees the next rise, and feels her sense of inadequacy renewed. As she slowly and painstakingly commands respect from her professors and fellow students, and earns her university scholarship, and her final degree, summa cum laude, her social orbits expand accordingly. She becomes a favorite of her professors, is befriended by their families, becomes friends with young men whom she considers oh so worldly and even takes one as a lover. As she ascends and sees more of how the world is constructed she understands with every step how dramatically underprepared she is for success of any real merit, and fears she will never catch up, and that somewhere along the line she will fall and never again rise. Happily, for Elena and reader both, she comes into her own by the end of the book with an over-the-top success that I will not reveal here.

Lila, Elena’s foil, is self-taught and quick on the draw. She’s like an animal trapped in a cage, biting and clawing her way out, game for any strategy that looks like it might work, ready to attack whoever gets in her way. Whereas Elena is plagued by self-doubt, always afraid of falling short in her studies, hesitant with men, Lila is full of herself, proud of her beauty and wit and sexual prowess. Elena says at several points that she draws strength from Lila’s brashness, that without Lila as a model she’d not only lack the courage to stand up for herself but wouldn’t even have a clue as to what to do, how to act. Yet on the other hand she at times considers Lila to be naïve, even vulgar. On the evening of the grand opening of the shoe store in downtown Naples in which Lila and her husband own a large share, Lila uncharacteristically suffers a bad case of jitters. She pulls Elena down a side street in order to talk and calm herself down. She reminds Elena of a scuffle they once witnessed on that very same street, years earlier, between the boys of their stradone against a group of well-dressed, middle-class kids. There were a few girls in that group, and one in particular. Lila asks Elena: “Do you remember that girl dressed in green, the one with the little hat?” Elena remembers at once and knows exactly what Lila’s thinking. Elena says, “It was all a question of money, Lila. Today everything’s different, you’re much prettier than that girl in the green dress.” But what Elena thinks and never says is that she’s lying, that there was something rotten in the inequality they experienced, and that she had come to understand what it was and Lila didn’t: It didn’t matter how much money Lila withdrew from the cash registers at Stefano’s shop or the shoe store, money wasn’t enough to hide their origins. That girl in the green dress was superior to them, and always would be, without so much as even wanting it.

Like a goddess of classical antiquity, Lila changes guise as she adopts various missions. When in the first volume her parents refuse to let her continue from elementary school to middle school, and she can no longer count on becoming rich by writing books, she sets her mind to designing shoes for her shoemaker father and brother to fabricate, while secretly reading, writing, and teaching herself Latin and Greek. When Stefano, the seemingly successful salumeria owner, courts her, she readily accepts him and the beautiful jewelry and clothes he showers upon her. When the second volume opens, as I’ve already noted, she’s enraged at the end of her wedding day when she learns she’s lost control of the shoe business she herself inspired, in a deal made by her father, brother, and husband with the mobster Solari brothers; soon after the horror of her honeymoon she allows herself to compromise, finding comfort in the luxuries of her new station as Stefano’s wife: a brand new apartment in the new section of the neighborhood, with a real bathtub (begone the large copper pot of her parents’ home); new kitchen appliances and furniture; a telephone and TV; and, parked right out front, a convertible. Having money for the first time in her life she spends it giddily, absent any restraints, so much so that her new mother-in-law complains to her son about how fast the money’s going out. When Elena sees Lila and Stefano driving around in their convertible she imagines them the Neapolitan version of John and Jackie Kennedy. There’s no doubt Lila thinks of herself the same way. But the large dark sunglasses Lila wears, as Elena soon learns, are meant to hide the bruises from Stefano’s beatings. When not long after her first wedding anniversary Lila falls for Nino, an old friend from elementary school, a brilliant student a few years older than Lila and Elena that Elena is secretly in love with, and has an affair with him practically under Stefano’s nose, she dives back into the books, wants to know everything Nino knows, wants to be just like him, wants to be considered a person of taste and intellect. At that same point Lila reassumes control of the shoe business, specifically the new shop in downtown Naples, where she adds her new literary sophistication to selling shoes. She creates a boutique complete with art and books, and divans where her customers—the wives and daughters of lawyers, doctors, and engineers—can gather for conversation and coffee, having fashioned herself a mid-century Miuccia Prada, so to speak. Just as I won’t reveal Elena’s closing victory I won’t reveal Lila’s last two transformations, other than to say that they lead in the direction opposite Elena’s: down and down. Nevertheless, despite all the metamorphoses Lila assumes, some things about her never change and those are the brand marks with which Elena connects with her friend, over and over again, the same way a hapless mortal might intuit the presence of a goddess: her ferocious intelligence, a wit like lightning with anger to match, and a way of narrowing her eyes into slits as she thinks through a problem and hatches a plan.

Whereas both women attempt to make sense of the world through reading and the written word—by the end of the second volume Lila is reading Ulysses while she sits with her infant son in a park—spoken language is the primary tool Elena uses to reshape her identity. She learns early, in middle school, that the ability to abandon dialect and speak standard Italian will be vital to her separating from her origins and assuming citizenship in a wider world. So she works hard at it, and takes great pride in her spoken Italian and in the fact that, until she enters university, her Neapolitan professors praise her eloquence. Once at the university, however, she’s told that her Italian is old-fashioned, somewhat flowery, and she’s teased for her Neapolitan accent. Humiliated, she embarks upon a campaign to rid herself of her accent and to learn a more sophisticated Italian. And she succeeds, so much so that when she returns to Naples to visit her family, her neighbors detect the loss of her accent and dub her La Pisana, the Pisan woman. One of the many poignant moments in the book occurs when, on that same visit home, her siblings attempt to speak with her not in dialect but in Italian. They are tentative with her, and self-correct their errors in embarrassment, and only slowly does she regain intimacy as their big sister.

Story of a New Name is a large, compelling story, so very rich in detail of thought and feeling—it touched a deep chord in me and as you may suspect I could go on for pages. But I won’t. I’m going to stop right here and let you go off to read the book. Allora, ciao—until next time, until Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Volume 3. And Buon Anno!

For D.C. locals especially: Take note of the Marco Bellocchio film series the Italian Cultural Institute is currently running with the National Gallery of Art. I had little idea of what to expect from Fists in Pockets (Pugni in Tasche), the opening film. I’d read that Bellocchio was highly regarded in Italy, a peer of Bertolucci and Pasolini and, like them, a member of the wave of filmmakers that immediately followed the neo-Realists. Fists in Pockets washis first feature film, he was only 26 in 1965 when he made it, and it’s remarkable.

I‘m hooked on Elena Ferrante, having recently finished My Brilliant Friend (L’Amica Geniale), the first novel of her Neapolitan trilogy. Not more than five minutes after I closed that book I ordered the next two volumes. How could I not? Well, to be perfectly honest, I will say that the book is a page-turner and very rarely do I read page-turners. I do not read for plot. I like complexity of language, and subtext, and the book has little to none of that.